


No Time to Say

by irolltwenties (Shenanigans)



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: M/M, Soulmate AU, Unpolished, tumblr prompt fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-31
Updated: 2019-12-31
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:02:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22054507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shenanigans/pseuds/irolltwenties
Summary: There’s a clock on your wrist that counts down until you meet them.
Relationships: Michael Guerin/Alex Manes
Comments: 2
Kudos: 104





	No Time to Say

Most people had something fairly simple: a small black clock face ticking through seconds. He’d seen the digital displays, a chance flip fronted clock face, and one that was a tree rolling through a season, leaves falling in gentle slow motion. Alex Manes enjoyed the websites that matched tattoos to time stamps that had started proliferating after the Event. 

Alex Manes wasn’t simple. He never had been.

The Humvee rocked from side to side, catching and pushing through the edge of a road that was less riddled with potholes and more washed out and scalloped edged in the dark. His front gunner had a tattoo on the inside of her wrist that had counted down to zero. She would show him the picture of her daughter, a pretty wild haired girl with freckles and two front teeth that he hoped the girl would grow into. She would smile quietly and tuck the picture back in her pocket and only breathe one word about what it was like. 

“Magic.”

“I never took you for a romantic, Morales,” Sargent Nichols would yell from where he was lolling with the edge of the road and trying to drowse.

“I’m a Complete,” she’d snap back, tongue tucked tartly behind her teeth. “You’re just jealous. No one wants to touch your sad little flip-phone-looking-nokia-read-out ass.”

“It’s vintage,” Nichols would reply by rote.

“Keep telling yourself that, bro.” 

Alex smiled quietly at as he bounced lightly through the hazing heat of the Afghan desert. The Air Force uniform kept most marks covered, the band issued after the Incident was supposed to keep everyone focused on the mission and not on the possibility of Completion. After the Incident, the rash of non complete and abandoned missions had left the higher ups confused and concerned. It made sense to Alex, but he was just a Captain.

It was hard to shoot the enemy when they might be the Match. The Event had rippled through the world; children born with clocks ticking time on their wrists. A generation Marked. The panic had been endemic, rippling through parents until the first Match rang a bell that couldn’t be stopped.

Alex Manes was the youngest of four brothers born to an unhappy pair of UnMarked parents. His oldest brother, Harlan, was a simple digital read out, ticking down unerringly to a zero he had yet to find. Hunter and Flint were supposed to be a matched set, but had turned out to be fraternal and uneven, they had military time stamps on opposite wrists. Alex was different. He’d looked. He’d taken the time during high school when Maria had exhaled the peppery skunk weed and scrolled through the site that had been started by some brilliant stranger out of MIT: markBook.

Everyone wanted to find their Match. Everyone wanted to be Complete. The older generation railed against the strange nihilism that rose in the younger, the understanding that the kids had that they were never meant to be alone. They were never supposed to be separate. The Marked generation traveled more, found a way to move through life following some quiet call that only they could hear. He’d met a girl who said she could hear her soulmate if she held her wrist to her ear. She’d been a lovely French backpacker walking the side of the road in a vintage Hermes scarf that covered her soft brown hair while she freckled delicately in the desert. 

“Don’t you hear yours?” she’d asked him. He’d just ducked his head, flicking his eyebrows up, and let her assume that was an answer before they’d rolled on.

War didn’t much care about soulmates. War didn’t care much about anything.

Alex Manes didn’t talk about his mark. His platoon knew better to ask. He’d simply duck his head, wet his lips, and go far away.

“It’s fucking weird,” Nichols whispered to Pogue one afternoon, trying to find shade somewhere under the Blackhawk she piloted. She was a short stocky woman with her hair cropped close to her head and knotted muscled calves. She would reach, grabbing the edge of her bird and haul up, smiling before she’d settled into the seat. Alex liked that about her, the joy of flight. She wasn’t looking for her Mark.

“Mines broken,” she told him one drunken thursday outside of Jalalabad. She’d sniffed, staring blearily at the sky before handing him the bottle and rolling to her knees, the sudden motion of the truly drunk that wobbled precariously as she wriggled her arm out of the black band they all word to cover their Marks. Hers counted to down, heading for a number that was eerily close to zero before hiccuping and starting over. He’d frowned softly.

“They reset if you die before you meet your Match.”

“That’s a rumor,” he’d whispered, secrets in the bourbon as she ground her teeth and squared her oddly delicate jaw.

“Always knew I was just too damn pretty to meet mine this time,” she’d answered, voice flat before she stole the bottle back and skidded back to sit.

Alex took lovers; he wasn’t a saint. He’d ached with the beautiful black haired boy in greece, the bronzed blond outside of Berlin, and then there was Daniel. Daniel who sang songs of surrender and hope in a quiet heartbreakingly beautiful tenor while he cleaned his rifle. Daniel who had the one crooked tooth that caught the corner of his mouth in a soft simmering smirk. Daniel who could have been the one. He could have. He could have been the one in the way his head would tip back, lashes thick as he watched Alex move in him. He could have been the one with the pull and the ache of sex gone meaningful. He could have been the one.

But Alex Manes was different. He always had been.

He hadn’t expected to come home in pieces. He was pretty sure no one ever did. He’d buried Pogue, the clock on her wrist caught with seconds left, finally static in a body gone cold. He remembers a few things about that night, the way the air smelled hot and wet, the burning metal a grinding ozone that almost drowned out the sweet stomach lurching copper of blood, and the farther scent of rain in the distance. He could hear the fire, hear the way the metal groaned and twisted. He could hear the soft noises of his ment dying. He could hear himself taking the short rapid breaths, but it felt far away as he stared up at the sky, stared up a the impossible beauty of the universe sprawled perfect in the dark.

His Mark never glitched. His Mark never moved. 

He’d trace the delicate lines of it in the shower sometimes. He’d wonder at the way it seemed lacelike and delicate, curving and moving around itself, twisting into something lovely and impossible. He’d marked it with pen when he was younger, trying to see if it was moving, trying to see if it was counting down to someone or something possible, but the lines stayed static. He wished it would move. He wished it would have moved the day he lost his heart to a beautiful boy with a smirk like a dare and a mouth like coming home. He wished it would have moved so that the feel of his blood on his face would have had meaning. He would have moved for his Match, he told himself. Fear couldn’t rule him forever.

Alex thought about Michael Guerin in the most inopportune times. He thought about him while he stared longingly at the sky, bleeding out and dying in a desert thousands of miles away from where he wanted to be. He wanted to tell him that it didn’t matter. He wanted to say he loved him. He wanted a reason to pull him close and taste that slippery sarcastic smile again.

He wanted the lines on his wrist to mean something. He wanted it to translate to a time when Michael could have been his.

“Alex.”

Michael Guerin was beautiful in the wind that whipped his hair around his face, the cut in his eyebrow and the angry tilt of his shoulders. Alex had wanted to shove him against the bowed side of that shitty airstream and whisper words against his mouth, but straightened instead. He didn’t have the right to love a boy that belonged to someone else. He didn’t have the right to want him.

Alex tried to stay away. He tried to keep his hands to himself. He tried to let Michael Guerin leave, to move on, to grow and find the other half of himself. He tried not to mangle him any more. It was the least he could do. 

“We just connected like… like something-” he was yelling, stuttering around the feel of the words in his mouth as he stared across the space at where Michael was golden and heartrendingly beautiful in a ratty ivory waffle weave and a tumble of curls. 

“Cosmic!” Michael finished and Alex came to a dead stop. 

Alex Manes was a smart man. He spoke five languages and could dance around the typical levels of security on a server with ease. He could field strip a rifle, play the guitar, and keep his mouth shut. Alex Manes was a smart man, but the moment he understood he couldn’t have told anyone his name, let alone spoken aloud.

Cosmic. Cosmic.

Alex Manes’ was a Marked man. He’d been tracing the gentle rolling pattern of lines and dots on the inside of his wrist for so long it seemed rote. He knew the exact curve it took, the geometry of the angles. He knew this mark and suddenly, with one word and the hope of his heart in his throat, he understood.

His mark never moved because it was a static star map that could be traced back to the moment of the Event: the 1947 crash at Roswell. His mark didn’t move because his Match had been waiting for him.

**Author's Note:**

> I know I'm fic dumping, but it's the end of the year and when else am I going to get the chance?


End file.
